Holmes: China invoking U.S. experience with civil war in comments on Taiwan

Posted: Tuesday, April 05, 2005

Last weekend, hundreds of thousands of Taiwanese citizens took to the streets to protest the "Anti-Secession Law" passed by China's National People's Congress in mid-March. Published by the official China Daily, the law codified Beijing's long-standing threat to use force to prevent Taiwan, which the mainland views as a renegade province, from moving toward formal independence. Its language authorized "non-peaceful means" to defeat Taiwanese independence.

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The law and the ensuing protests marked the latest climax in a war of political symbols that has raged across the Taiwan Strait for years. Beijing and Taipei are struggling to define their relations not only in the minds of Chinese and Taiwanese citizens, but also in the minds of powerful outsiders, namely decisionmakers in the United States. China wants to discourage U.S. involvement in the cross-strait dispute; Taiwan has pinned its hopes on U.S. involvement.

Whoever prevails in the war of symbols will gain a decided edge in the cross-strait standoff.

James

Holmes

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At issue is the "one-China principle," which has governed relations between the island and the mainland since the 1970s. Beijing fears that Taiwan's President Chen Shui-bian, re-elected last year to the consternation of Chinese leaders, is attempting to move the island toward outright independence. The one-China principle holds that Taiwan remains part of a single China and will relinquish its de facto independence at some unspecified future date.

Taipei has been edging away from the one-China principle for years. Chen's predecessor, Lee Teng-hui, defined cross-strait ties as a "special state-to-state relationship," implying the existence of a sovereign Taiwan. An outpouring of vitriol from Beijing was Lee's reward. For his part, Chen has vowed to enact a new constitution for the island by 2008. Beijing, which views a new constitution as tantamount to a declaration of independence, has repeatedly threatened war.

Why such fury? As its ideological appeal dwindles, China's ruling Communist Party has tied its survival to Chinese nationalism. Allowing Taiwan to go its own way could spell the doom of the communist regime. No regime would countenance its own destruction.

Geopolitics also helps explain the ferocity of Beijing's rhetoric. Chinese strategists are quick to point to former Secretary of State Dean Acheson's speech sketching a "defense perimeter of the Pacific" running along the island chain that roughly parallels the Chinese coast. They are equally quick to point to Gen. Douglas MacArthur's famous depiction of Taiwan as "an unsinkable aircraft carrier," an offshore base for radiating power along China's periphery.

A Taiwan in unfriendly hands could threaten the flow of the seagoing oil and gas shipments China needs to sustain economic growth and development. It could also constrain the efforts of China's increasingly capable navy to project power into the Pacific.

So much for the motives propelling Chinese policy toward the island. Beijing has used a variety of diplomatic tactics to discourage U.S. intervention in the cross-strait feud. One Chinese general sought to exploit post-9/11 worries about terrorism, characterizing Chen's regime as "Taiwan independence terrorists" bent on destroying China's Three Gorges Dam in case of war.

Beijing has also invoked international law in an effort to place the China-Taiwan conflict off-limits to U.S. diplomacy. When the U.S. House of Representatives condemned the Anti-Secession Law, for instance, an official from the National People's Congress retorted that "No foreign forces have the right to intervene" in a purely internal matter. Chinese spokesmen routinely denounce U.S. statements on Taiwan for infringing on China's sovereignty.

And finally, China has cast the dispute in terms readily intelligible to Americans. The title of the Anti-Secession Law translates more precisely as "Anti-Splittist Law," "splittist" being China's usual term for advocates of Taiwanese independence. The choice of the term "secession" to characterize Taiwanese independence was clearly meant to remind Americans their country had once fought to prevent a group of states from leaving the Union.

Who were Americans to gainsay China's right to follow their example? The Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao, said as much in the wake of the passage of the Anti-Secession Law, likening the legislation to the laws passed by the Union to prevent Southern secession. "In the United States," declared Wen, "the civil war broke out, but we here do not wish to see such a situation."

Beijing's narrative, then, is of an aggrieved, sovereign nation determined, like Lincoln's America, to preserve its unity at all costs. If this narrative induces Washington to hesitate or stand aside during a cross-strait military confrontation, China will have won by adroit diplomacy what it might lose in a trial of arms.

 Holmes is a senior research associate at the University of Georgia Center for International Trade and Security and an international-relations instructor in the University's Honors Program.